Thursday, February 1, 2018

Children of the Sun

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All life requires energy to survive, and our primary source
of energy is the sun, a fireball of nuclear fusion.On Earth, the plant people absorb this energy
and convert it into simple carbohydrates.Humans and other animals extract these nutrients from edible plants, and/or
from the flesh of plant eating animals.

Alfred Crosby’s book, Children
of the Sun, presents a history of how humans access energy.It’s a good companion to his earlier book, Throwing
Fire, a history of projectile use, spanning from thrown stones to nuclear
weapons.Both discuss the rapid
acceleration of innovation, population, and ecological impacts.This growing instability over the centuries
is largely off the radar in our day-to-day lives.Most of our brain cycles are engaged in the here
and now, a pushbutton wonderland of nonstop magic.

Crosby reminds readers of the obvious fact that fossil energy
is finite, and the large, high quality deposits are approaching their finish
lines.We are making little effort to
wrap our heads around the notion that our high-impact energy-guzzling lifestyle
has an expiration date.Instead, we
pretend — with all our might — that the here and now is perfectly “normal,” and
everything is excellent.

When the spirits of our wild ancestors observe today’s
“normal” they see a nightmarish insane asylum.Powerful historians like Crosby can vaporize the walls of our madhouse, and
allow us to perceive the hundreds of centuries of turbulent cultural evolution that
preceded our birth.We can observe the
spirit of progress transition from an occasional draft, to a strong wind, and
the full-scale hurricane of today.

In the 200,000 years since the first Homo sapiens
punched in at the time clock, almost all generations have been wild nomadic
hunter-gatherers, living in a manner that was far simpler, and much closer to
sustainable.For almost the entire human
saga, this slower, gentler mode was the long term “normal.”But it wasn’t normal.

Some scholars have speculated that if space aliens had
visited 100,000 years ago, humans would have appeared to be ordinary animals of
no significance. Wrong!We were roasting steaks with domesticated fire,
a spooky trick never performed by ordinary animals.Fire was domesticated prior to Homo sapiens, maybe
500,000 years ago, maybe a million, nobody knows.

When our ancestors burned biomass like wood, they were
utilizing the solar energy stored by the tree.Fire provided some benefits.It
intimidated hungry predators.It enabled
our ancestors to survive in regions outside the tropics.It made cooking possible, a huge
advance.Cooking partially predigests
foods, making it easier for our guts to extract more nutrients from them.It also transforms a number of inedible
substances into edible sources of nutrition.Chimps spend six hours a day chewing raw foods. Of course, progress is never free — fire
making eventually led to huge unintended consequences, like megafauna extinctions,
industrial civilization, the population explosion, and an unstable
climate.

It’s fun to play “what if…”What if that first fire starter, who learned how to make sparks with
friction, had been ripped to shreds by hyenas prior to his or her discovery?Without fire, furless hominids could not have
survived in chilly non-tropical regions.The snow monkeys of Japan solved this challenge by evolving heavy winter
coats.Would Homo sapiens have ever evolved at all,
limited to a raw food diet?Would the Americas
and Europe of today still be human-free wildernesses, home to healthy
populations of mammoths, bison, and sabertooth cats?

Over time, our ancestors got better at hunting and basic
survival.When some groups moved out of
the tropics, they encountered conditions for which evolution had not fine-tuned
them.They needed tighter shelters, warm
clothing, and food storage for the lean seasons.Clever innovations could increase the odds
for survival, and the cleverer we got, the better.Over the millennia, our addiction to
innovation snowballed.Like an arms
race, the groups possessing the most powerful juju were likely to displace or
erase the bubbas with inferior juju.

And so, the clever ones spread around the globe.Growing numbers eventually ran out of
uninhabited lands to colonize, leading to growing friction.Too much cleverness eventually led to what Ronald
Wright called “the perfection of hunting.”By killing megafauna a bit faster than they could recover over the
centuries, big game gradually got scarce.Our menu shifted toward small game, and then to aquatic edibles.

The domestication of plants and animals was another
Earth-shaking innovation.We could now
exploit solar energy more efficiently.More
people could live on less land.Never
before had we controlled so much energy.Population grew, spurring instability.The enslavement of animals like horses and oxen provided us with pack
animals to carry stuff, and traction animals to pull stuff.No longer was the work in human communities
performed solely by human muscle power.Enslaved animals could be exploited in many ways.

By A.D. 1000, clever ones had learned how to capture more
energy with waterwheels, windmills, and sailing ships, but muscle power was
still the primary energy.We were
drifting toward the limits of utilizing solar energy via agriculture and
burning wood.As forests disappeared, the
clever ones began burning coal.Eventually, mineshafts reached the water table, and muscle powered
gizmos were unable to remove the water fast enough.So, brilliant lads invented steam engines
that could pump water and keep the mines dry.

Until maybe 1700, human society ran primarily on the muscle
power of humans and animals.The steam
engine, like the domestication of plants, animals, and fire, was a major
advance with horrendous unintended consequences.The speed of innovation became a constantly
accelerating whirlwind — locomotives, steamships, and multiple-spindle spinning
machines.Lighting switched from the
flickering hearth fire, to candles, then whale oil lamps, then coal gas, then
kerosene, then electric lights.

Steam engines were pushed to the sidelines by internal
combustion engines, which were used to power automobiles, tractors, trucks,
locomotives, ships, and many other machines.Gasoline couldn’t run a sewing machine 100 miles away, but electricity
could.We invented generators, installed
power grids, built hydroelectric dams, and nuclear power plants.We invented telegraphs, telephones, radio,
television.The herd grew explosively
from one billion to two, three, four, five, six, seven…Zoom, zoom, zoom…

For a while, the Peak Oil doomsters made us nervous, with
their predictions that the production of conventional oil would likely peak
around 2005, which it did.But we got
distracted by the growing production unconventional oil from oil shale
(fracking) and tar sands, and returned to pretending that we have no
limits.Let’s go shopping!

Thankfully, Crosby provides readers with an embarrassing
birds-and-bees talk about EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested).In the 1930s, the EROEI of oil production was
100:1 — it took one unit of energy to extract 100 units from the underground
reserves.When he was writing in 2006,
it had dropped to 17:1.Today, it’s
less.Low EROEI means that lots of oil
will be left in the ground forever, regardless of how high the price eventually
rises.Imagine having a job that paid
$100 per day, but the bridge toll to get there was $105.

Crosby offers us no silver bullet solutions. “Winning streaks are rarely permanent.”The easiest approach to our challenges is to
continue living foolishly and hope for miracles.The smartest response would be sanity — limit
population, cut consumption, live lightly, and abandon nuclear and fossil
energy.“We have every reason to believe
that we are capable of environmental sanity; but first we have to accept that
the way we live now is new, abnormal, and unsustainable.”